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Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
121–130 of 563 posts
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#122I can't call my new formula translation language FORTRAN because it's been taken, as have many other names. So now to avoid collisions, it's named after my cat.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The product name is not expected to describe what the product is. There are some exceptions, but the agriculture machinery industry has actually gotten pretty good at making the names useful, with reasonable consistency across brands. S7 600: 600 tells that it is a class 6 combine, which is a value farmers understand as it pertains to the combine's capacity. For tractors, the John Deere 8R 230 sees 8 indicate a lar…
Useful if you already know the basics of what it is. My point is that "S7 600" by itself doesn't tell you anything if you don't have some knowledge of the product already. The knowledge that it's a combine is separate. Similarly, "emacs" tells you nothing if you don't know it, but the generic term "editor" is descriptive. Software doesn't generally encode product attributes into the name the way 230 means 230 horsepo…
Software often puts the version in the name. Which is the same as the S7 designation in the case of said combine. S7 is just a restyled S7x0 series combine, which was the successor to the S6x0 series.
It's not a perfect system. Before the S6x0 was the 9x70STS series, after the 9x60STS series, and the 9x50STS series. You can find a version number in there, albeit not a perfectly sequential one. Although that's nothing new. Windows 3.1 turned 3.11, 95, 98. iOS 17 turned 26. You get the picture.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#124> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field. This article would certainly disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def... > the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait. Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?". > The Hoover…
I think the author makes a hard distinction between consumer products and infrastructure/engineering products. The Shelby Cobra has a funny name, but its engine is the memorably named V8. The Hoover Dam is a dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge.
We can argue about namespace pollution and overly long names, but I think there's a point there. When I look at other profession's jargon, I never have the impression they are catching Pokemon like programmers do.
Except for the ones with Latin and Greek names, but old mistakes die hard and they're not bragging about their intelligibility.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#125C
C post increment
See sharp
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#126The author is vastly overestimating the general legibility and familiarity of things they happen to know well and are used to.
Boring names are also very generic, by definition, and thus often harder to remember. Especially when there are 10 other similar tools. Is it sql-validator, sql-schema-validator, schema-validate, db-validator, or god knows what else?
Edit: I am in favor of better “sub titles” / descriptive slugs / and so on. As well as names that are a hybrid of creative and descriptive. Sqlalchemy is a good example.
Why isn’t there a command line utility called “whatisthis” with a standard protocol that allows tools to give a brief description of what they are?
It could be extended to package managers as well. E.g “pip whatisthis foo_baz”.
Shit we should create this…
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#127Just name everything Phoenix.
(The joke here is: look up how many _major_ software projects have been named Phoenix at some point. It's a lot.)
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#128That glorious day when I explained to my boss what wiki is and that we should have one internally, he fired "viki" into google, with smoothly honed muscle memory clicked first result..and got full screen of poon.
What was the first result? Mine is Rakuten Viki, a streaming service focused on Asian dramas that aren’t like what you described.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#129Once again proving that there are two very hard problems in software engineering: Naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.
Re: Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools
#130LMAO ok dude, don't like it? fork it and change the name. The author has a DEEP misunderstanding of the science of human language, not surprised he's a Chomskyite.
Rule of thumb, disregard every post that uses the phrase "context switching"